Applications of Short-Range Wireless Technologies to Industrial Automation: A ZigBee Approach

Bluetooth, ultra-wideband (UWB), ZigBee, and Wi-Fi are four popular wireless standards for short-range communications. Specifically, ZigBee network is an emerging technology designed for low cost, low power consumption and low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPAN) with a focus on the device-level communication for enabling the wireless sensor networks. In this paper, after a brief overview of the four short-range wireless standards, the developed ZigBee platforms, ITRI ZBnode, have been presented for wireless sensor networking applications. Moreover, design issues for ZigBee industrial applications and the experimental implementation have been demonstrated via a multi-hop tree network.